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Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

awinedrowning: if you are blind and you take LSD... does anything happen?

my initial answer to this is you probably feel an extraordinary amount of different things, not just things you can SEE as we have come to know what SEEing is.

the blind SEE with their skin, their ears. their mouths, their noses. think of a pentagon equally divided into five sections, each shaded in a certain amount. remove one section, leaving four sections, but still distribute the area equally, this time between four sections instead of five. this is how i always understood the way that those with sensory disabilities adapt. i could be wrong.

my initial answer would be to say that they'll probably start to continue with the standard effects of LSD (hyperactive, lucid imagination) that plays itself out in the standard sorts of ways. new ideas, new experiences, free from the boundaries we're used to, and almost haunted in each new idea's life.

my initial answer would most likely continue through to say that they would probably feel things that weren't real on their skin, they'd hear things that weren't real in their ears. although with their other senses, they might smell or taste things that weren't real as well.

the initial answer changes a little bit when you throw the idea of someone who wasn't blind their entire life. which then gets more fine tuned when you think about how much of their life was spent with vision, and at what accuracy. did they lose their sight by way of degeneration, or an instant act?

i read up on the drug, though, when i got home tonight. apparently, albert hofmann, the father of LSD, experienced "fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors" when he closed his eyes on one of the first days of accidentally stumbling upon the more 'psychedelic' uses of this drug. three days later, he went on a full-on TRIP, taking a theoretic "maximum dosage", and ended up experiencing a maelstrom of things, as you can imagine.

he began to speak unintelligibly, and on his assisted bike ride home felt that he was completely stationary while in reality he was actually moving at a "very rapid" pace. for several hours, he thought he was possessed, his neighbor was a witch, and that his furniture was threatening him. one key thing he mentioned (in specific reference to the blind) is every acoustic perception, such as the sound of a passing automobile, was transformed into optical perceptions. the next day, he mentions, though, (in contrast to the blindness) that his breakfast tasted unusually delicious, and all of his senses were "vibrating in a condition of highest sensitivity, which then persisted for the entire day".

to further color coordinate:...an experience of radiant colors, objects and surfaces appearing to ripple or "breathe," colored patterns behind the eyes, a sense of time distorting (time seems to be stretching, repeating itself, changing speed or stopping), crawling geometric patterns overlaying walls and other objects, morphing objects, a sense that one's thoughts are spiraling into themselves, loss of a sense of identity or the ego (known as "ego death"), and powerful, and sometimes brutal, psycho-physical reactions interpreted by some users as reliving their own birth Many users experience a dissolution between themselves and the "outside world".

further breakdown:VISUAL:includes the illusion of movement of static surfaces ("walls breathing"), after image-like trails of moving objects ("tracers"), the appearance of moving colored geometric patterns (especially with closed eyes), an intensification of colors and brightness ("sparkling"), new textures on objects, blurred vision, and shape suggestibility. the inanimate world appears to animate in an unexplained way.

AURAL:echo-like distortions of sounds, a mixing of all sounds which makes it harder to discern distinct sounds, the feeling that what you're hearing is your thought, a general intensification of the experience of music, and an increased discrimination of instruments and sounds.

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so, i think my answer is close, although there seems to be a lot more going on with the visual end of things.

Friday, April 18, 2008

i wasn't sure if respite is the word, but it was. for various things, at the moment.

it took me a few pages to say everything, and it was all disjointed until the end. there were a lot of small things i needed to say that didn't make sense in summary or conclusion. big liner notes. remember-the-time's. perspective. i don't even remember what it says. i get arrogant or egotistical or archival, and always find the need to have a copy of things that i've written to someone. i didn't this time. again, for various reasons.

-

SEEKING:creative peers.

we're all very silly about our feelings. popping them up in the electronic field. let's feel good about what we're making and share it with each other instead of making it a VIP experience as part of a larger audience. call if you need to ask.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

i started thinking about who, exactly, i'm writing for. the perfect, "correct" answer would be myself. i write because i need to and i want to. i don't care who my audience is, what they think, how they react, or what they would like more or less of. i write to exorcise my own demons, and to manifest my own emotions into wellsprings of wordsplendor.

while this is true some of the time, it's not true all of the time. there are callings for both sorts of explorations, and i think that since i've just started to think a little bit more about these different facets as real functions, it starts to add a little bit more mechanic to the magic of the medium that i love most.

i've had more than a fair share of ideas for fiction that i thought i would start to unwind for my own love of the concept, and my own emotional output. the vision that i would have for a project would begin to collaborate with the ideas that i'd been inspired by and the collective surrounding environmental elements (background music, room noise, setting) to make a real product out of the raw skeletons that i were starting to collect muscle and skin in the brain. the more that i would get out the initial ideas, the more i would start to draw upon my peers and heroes for inspiration. what would THIS person do, or how would ANOTHER person write this? what would make SO AND SO love this?

and it becomes hard to retain that creative vacuum once you've gone that far.

i haven't written in a while, and it's certainly not because of a lack of ideas or emotions. there are plenty of both running completely rampant right behind the membranes of my fingers. my problem, at this point, is the idea that maybe no one would care. i think that's a very wrong outlook to have on any hobby, but especially one that tends to have such a relieving effect as a creative outlet.

i recently went through my old livejournal account and deleted much of what i read that i felt shouldn't exist. it was an odd thought process. i wasn't embarrassed of it or anything. well, i think i was. but i also just did to it what i think i want to do to anything that i read and don't approve of. approve may be too harsh a term. but looking back on those entries, i feel that there was this enormous imaginary audience that i felt i might have been speaking to. that concept sort of disgusted me. i'd start off entries by saying, "hey folks," and would apologize for "not writing as much" as if anyone noticed.

it's not something that i'm about. make the music you want to make, and the people who should find out about your music will. that's kind of the overall mindset i try to keep on all things. the whole "be yourself" ideal. if you try hard to impress someone by being something you're not and you succeed, you can either fail in the long run or become someone that you're not. there is no success here. if you live what you want to live, the others that live the way that you live (and therefore should be your peers, friends, associates, etc.) should become attracted to you. this goes for writing as well, and really, everything.

i feel like that whole concept is applied even in the distribution of this blog as a whole. livejournal and the myspace blog system just seem to become too watered down, and even when they aren't watered down, it almost becomes interpreted that you're trying to bring out a reaction or a response.

i've been having a hard time with that whole thought process for a little while. i thought maybe if i'd confront it by giving it a body of words it might be a little easier to tackle and eventually overcome.

--

i posted the poster for THERE WILL BE BLOOD back when i first saw the movie at the farmingdale theater during a matinee showing with about 7-10 other people, all at least twice my age. to me, that's always how this movie will feel perfectly viewed, and i've described it the same way every time:

it's a very silent, personal experience.

if i saw it in a packed theater with someone else, that might be how i'd feel it needed to be seen as well, but i'll never be sure.

i've since watched this movie twice. at first, i wasn't exactly sure what i'd taken from it aside from the fact that daniel day lewis crafted a masterpiece of the soul in daniel plainview. but after seeing it a third time overall, i know what it is.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

i almost called in sick today. i was so into this weather and it brought back intense vibes of when i first came back and who i was seeing and what we were doing and what i was reading and listening to and writing. and so much has changed since then and i've mired myself down into this particular situation and have been working and coming inside and playing video games and not reading a word that didn't lead to shooting or cutting someone down but i have been earning a lot of achievement points which is more or less alright. i looked at the weather over the next few days and it's not more of the same, it goes back to what it was doing before it was doing this. but today is like a trailer. i'm okay with that, because i've been waiting long enough.

today makes me feel good.

this upcoming week, i get to legitimately find out some information which will affect the next months or years of my residential life. and romantic life.

this is pretty wonderful.the artist took the book ON THE ROAD and broke it down into colors and numbers, essentially. the color of the burst is the subject, and the size of the burst is the number of words.

not only is it impressive in vision and scope of the work, but for me, at least, it works as a great reminder of all of the different things i felt while reading this book.